Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Only now does it occur to me... THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER

Only now does it occur to me... hot, sweet hell––there exists a movie, cast with "professional" actors, some whom I personally adore, some Oscar-nominated (I'm looking at you, Dennis Hopper), and some who have starred on their own television series. And of them all, the most consistently solid performance might belong to... Tara Reid!Seen here quoting Shakespeare...

...and making it her own.

She even gets to "Lady M" it for a spell:Out, out damned spot

Holy cow, this thing is a mess. I'm christening it the first "Hot Topic Western." The general pace is like Oliver Stone had a seizure while directing a lesser FROM DUSK TILL DAWN sequel. The mise-en-scéne is like Rob Zombie's Satanic love child with the worst episodes of ANGEL. I swear it has more tangible connections to xXx than THE CROW, and it's supposed to be a sequel to THE CROW.

And that ANGEL reference isn't out of left field: this thing has David Boreanaz in full "Angelus" mode, wearing mesh shirts he must've stolen from Bruce Willis in THE FIFTH ELEMENT.
Like some BUFFY/ANGEL fans, I have a kind of love/hate relationship with David Boring-anz (as I occasionally refer to him). He's serviceable as the stoic, mostly emotionless Angel (and as the puppet version)––but when he goes into "psycho vamp" mode and becomes "Angelus," he's acting beyond the limits of his wheelhouse and can't quite pull it off. But I kind of like that, too, because there's certainly a kitsch value to it.I like it in a slightly different sense than Tara Reid "likes" his offensive Native American headband, is what I'm saying.

Because he yearns to be Satan (and does, indeed, eventually become him), he has a biker gang named after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that he exclusively feeds with "Devil"-themed food.

I obviously approve of this, wholeheartedly.

Elsewhere, we have Danny Trejo as a kind-hearted preacherman (this only adds to the lesser-DUSK TILL DAWN sequel vibe):

Danny Trejo––not playing a criminal for once!

Marcus Chong (a.k.a. "Tank" from THE MATRIX) as "War," one of Boreanaz's horse/henchmen,
who, dressed in a red jumpsuit and strapped with dynamite, really reminded me of those annoying, dynamite-slinging enemies from the legendary arcade game FINAL FIGHT:

Dennis Hopper as "El Niño," a Satanic High Priest who calls everybody "homey" for no discernible reason and has Macy Gray as one of his henchwomen:

And finally Edward Furlong as local loser "Jimmy Cuervo" who is transformed by death into the revenge-seeking "The Crow,"

whereupon he wields a baseball bat like a lightsaber

and delivers wicked but unconvincing one-liners such as:

Ohhhhh yeah.

This movie is so perfectly awkward, absurdly incomprehensible, and nigh unwatchable, that we require a bad comedy cliché as our exit strategy. Who will step forward and deliver said cliché?

Yeah, it definitely had all the ingredients of a fun, straight-to-video flick but ended up being quite painful––at the very least it should have been as fun as FROM DUSK TILL DAWN 3, Ambrose Bierce notwithstanding.

Details of Note

Junta Juleil Productions, LTD. is a Brooklyn-based film and theatre production collective founded by Sean Gill, filmmaker and playwright. Junta Juleil's Culture Shock is a film blog dedicated to forgotten and occasionally cheesy genre fare. For more about Sean Gill, visit:
Sean Gill Films.